Wikipedia founder doesn’t trust ICOs

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, whose face many can recognize from his old Wikipedia donation request message that once became a meme, has lately told CNBC what he thinks about initial coin offerings.

Initial coin offerings happen when a business decides to attract funds to its project and issues digital tokens, the price of which can vary. However, may consider ICOs to be overrun with scammers, both state officials around the world and cryptocurrency code developers.

Jimmy Wales is one of these skeptics as well. "There are a lot of these initial coin offerings which are in my opinion are absolute scams and people should be very wary of things that are going on in that area," he told the network. Although blockchain technology, Wales tells, is good and will stay with us for some time to come.

Vitalik Buterin, who created Ethereum, and Jay Clayton, the head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, have also previously voiced their concerns about initial coin offerings. Buterin vowed he will not tolerate open-source developers’ ICOs and created a private fund as an alternative, while Mr. Clayton told about “pump-and-dump” schemes unscrupulous market participants often use in ICOs.